GOVERNMENT has made another U-turn on its 2023 election promise to dish out title deeds to informal settlers saying the affected homeowners have to go through an application process.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa promised to dole out the documents ahead of last year’s August elections in what was seen as a campaign gimmick.
Cabinet endorsed the Kwangu/Ngakwami Presidential Title Deeds Programme Consortium as part of the initiative.
Mnangagwa, however, only handed out 265 securitised title deeds to selected Epworth residents.
Housing and Social Amenities minister Zhemu Soda was singing a different tune on Wednesday in Parliament when lawmakers demanded answers on the matter.Soda acknowledged delays in the issuance of the title deeds alleging there are many processes involved.
He said a task force comprising various ministries, including Local Government and National Housing, Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement, Information as well as Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs ministries will now oversee the process.
He also said government is collaborating with the private sector, specifically the Kwangu Trust on the exercise.
“So, the Kwangu Trust, I believe in Epworth where the programme was launched, now have a site office, whereby people who want to get title deeds go there and submit their applications,” Soda said.
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“The applications require the local authorities or local councils to issue offer letters.
“Although a person may have settled through a co-operative, they are supposed to be acknowledged that, indeed, they are the owners of that land.”
A title deed is a formal document legally defining how a property is allotted by an authority, owned and transferred by the holder.
The country has witnessed the sprouting of illegal settlements, with suspected land barons linked to Zanu PF cited as the culprits.
Council officials and critics have accused Zanu PF-affiliated land barons of illegally grabbing land and selling housing stands to desperate home-seekers.
Some of the houses are built on wetlands.
Top Harare council officials and councillors have also been arrested in the past for illegal land deals in the capital, an indication of the widespread corruption and disorder around the allocation of housing stands.
Soda claimed that government and Kwangu are co-ordinating processes required for the regularisation of illegal settlements.
“The title deeds will then be issued because some people settled where there are supposed to be roads or schools. So, this will be done through regularisation and sanitisation,” he said.
Justice minister and leader of government business in Parliament, Ziyambi Ziyambi said illegal structures would be regularised.
“The whole idea of giving a title deed is to unlock value so that we can use that title deed to have an infrastructure development bond being registered and we use that bond for infrastructural development,” Ziyambi said.
“So, the whole idea is to ensure that in areas that are underdeveloped, we start by identifying the beneficiaries and we say these are the beneficiaries. Once we have identified all those, we make sure that they are moved away.
“We then issue title deeds when we have properly identified the beneficiaries.”
Thousands of dwellers have no title deeds to the land they were allocated in peri-urban settlements created on farms repossessed by government during the 2000 chaotic land reform programme.
A Tendai Uchena commission of inquiry report presented to Mnangagwa in December 2019 alleged that land developers, housing co-operative leaders and politically-connected people illegally sold US$3 billion worth of urban State land to create unregulated settlements.
According to government, Harare Metropolitan province has 52 000 houses built in illegal settlements, with 25 000 of the structures located in Chitungwiza as of 2023.
Instead, authorities rush to regularise illegal structures in areas controlled by the ruling Zanu PF party as a vote-buying gimmick.
